Congestion pricing is now three weeks away, just about where New York was in June when Gov. Hochul shocked everyone and pulled the plug. However, the critical tolling program to fund transit and reduce traffic, painstakingly enacted after decades of effort, didn’t just suffer a six-month political interruption, but Hochul’s clearly illegal delay and the looming Trump administration have put its very implementation in peril.
Hochul says she only intervened to reduce the fee to drive south of 60th St. from $15 to $9. If so, that should have been done long prior to three weeks before the tolling was to start and paired with getting rid of exemptions and discounts, as the lower price means more cars needing to pay in order to bring in the same amount of revenue required, $1 billion a year.
Instead, half a billion dollars of toll income was lost forever and the lower fee (with the original exemptions and discounts remaining in place) will generate only about half as much for transit. But that assumes the cameras and E-ZPass readers get activated on Jan. 5 and stay on past Jan. 20.
If Hochul had an election in mind, to help suburban Democrats win more contested U.S. House seats, there was another election that mattered much for the fate of congestion pricing: Donald Trump’s victory. The results show that risking congestion pricing just wasn’t worth it as the lone suburban seat that switched from the Republican to the Democrats, Long Island GOP freshman Anthony D’Esposito losing to Laura Gillen, wasn’t decided over tolls, but was more of a local course correction.
The seat, covering the southern half of Nassau County, was held by Democrats for more than a quarter of a century. It was narrowly won by D’Esposito besting Gillen in 2022 when fellow Long Islander Lee Zeldin was the Republican gubernatorial nominee and Hochul was at the top of the Democratic ticket. In the 2024 rematch, Gillen put the seat back in the Democratic column.
The two other House Republican freshmen who fell last month were in districts very far from Manhattan, in places like Syracuse and Ithaca and the Catskills, where only the tiniest number of constituents would be impacted by congestion pricing.
However, that other Nov. 5 contest, Trump beating Kamala Harris, means that just 15 days after the planned congestion pricing start date of Jan. 5, the pro-congestion pricing officials in the U.S. Department of Transportation will be replaced by people placed there by Trump, who boasted that he would “TERMINATE Congestion Pricing in my FIRST WEEK back in Office!!”
Trump and his DOT may not even need to try to order the cameras turned off because the cameras may not even be running on Jan. 20 if one of the 10 federal lawsuits against congestion pricing gets a judge to just postpone the tolls by a few weeks. In that instance, should the feds rescind their approval, New York and the MTA may have to file their own lawsuit saying that the Trump administration had no right to reverse the action of the Biden administration.
Or maybe the Republican House and Senate will pass something to undo the tolling authorization. Had tolls been in place since June that would have been harder, than if they hadn’t started yet. And the only reason they didn’t start in June is Kathy Hochul.
